If you have your Windows 8 settings sync'd to skydrive (Installed Apps and App data), you should see that your store apps are automatically installed and configured as previously. So there shouldn't be any need to manually re-install all your store apps.Reply

All is software except tiled resources which is split into two parts. Tier 1 implementations which will work on existing hardware with new drivers, and tier 2 which requires new hardware. Certain functionality is not available on tier 1 devices.Reply

Tier 2 will only work on a small subset of hardware, such as amd's newer 7000 cards (likely harnessing their support for partially resident textures). As far as I am aware other existing 11.1 cards will not work, and will require 11.2 hardware.Reply

Well I believe the only other existing 11.1 hardware is haswell, so that should be easy to test. According to Dave from AMD, it should work though (I would post the link from b3d, but apparently anand thinks I'm a spammer). Perhaps he meant all AMD cards that support 11.1 support tier 2? The whole situation is pretty ambiguous. Reply

This would make sense, since AMD's newer cards (7900, not sure if the other 7000 cards do) supports partially resident textures already, and thus it seems logical that this hardware can be leveraged for tier 2 support. I'm unaware of any other 11 or 11.1 grade hardware that supports it (the GTX700 series is also 11.1)Reply

"Windows 8.1 will ship with support for Intel’s Connected Standby technology for Haswell"

Connected Standby is a Windows 8/RT feature, and Intel are simply supporting it. You make it sound like it's the other way around.

I hope you guys have a detailed article on the new features. I already know most stuff so would be nice if you went in to detail because thats the stuff thats hard to find. Maybe also talk about the new DX 11.2 features and what they could mean? Also run some quick benchmarks too (i know it's just a preview but it's interesting), i hear battery life is slightly improved and RAM usage is further reduced (8 already reduced it over 7).Reply

the main two applications I use already advertise to windows that they are dpi aware but they do a terrible job at it. Sounds like this will continue to be an issue. I wonder if there is a way to force them into virtualization Reply

Okay, I admit I didn´t read through all of the document but the only changes I see are a bunch of changes related to higher-dpi displays and multiple displays having different dpi:s, and how programmers can now easier adapt to those situations. I don´t see anything about getting existing apps (dpi-unaware) to look decent in high DPI settings, which for me has always been the big issue since once you turn up the dpi basically everything in desktop mode just looks awful. In what way does 8.1 improve in how it handles existing apps on single high-dpi displays? Those of you that have tried it does existing (not dpi-aware) apps look better in 8.1 than they did in win7 at high-dpi settings?Reply

DPI-Unaware ApplicationsDPI-unaware applications are applications thatalways render at 96 DPI, which is the lowest destop DPI plateau. This class of applications are unaware of different system DPIs. The Desktop Window Manager (DWM) virtualizes and scales these applications to account for high DPI.

Perhaps this answers your question.Can anyone with the preview verify?Reply

Yeah, I hope that´s what it means but then I took a look at the table on p4 which lists what features have been available in different versions of windows from XP through 8.1 and there I found "DPI virtualization of DPI-unaware applications" and it´s listed as being there in Vista, 7 and 8 as well as 8.1 so nothing new. Also on p7 they say the scaling and virtualization of these was introduced in Vista and since I´ve seen how appaling Vista and 7 handles this I was hoping for something dramatically different in 8.1.

I do hope you´re right but can anybody confirm that DPI-unaware apps in fact look good (or at least much better than in 7) at higher DPI settings in 8.1? This alone would indeed be a reason for me personally to switch to 8.1 from 7...Reply

that document states that this happens in windows vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 So I don't think this has changed in 8.1. The only thing they appear to have changed is multi monitor independent DPI and automatic DPI selection.Reply

I think they improved the windows applications handling of DPI so they no longer look blurry (like explorer for example), and hopefully the renewed interest in DPI will force application makers to improve their scaling. Especially with the new Microsoft examples and documentationReply

Tricking the apps that are DPI-unaware and render all bitmap items at a much higher res (pixel-doubling or such) and then scale it down using some clever techniques (anti-aliasing?) while rendering native windows components such as borders and fonts at native res directly. Something similar to what apple does in ios. Not magic but obviously apple does unfortunately do a much better job at the moment (in win7 at least)Reply

I fail to see how rendering bitmaps at a higher res then scaling them down helps at all. The problem is not about the images, it is about layout. Old desktops apps don't use any kind of layout machanisms, many of the controls are just placed in the window at "pos=x,y size=w,h" and windows has to conform to that. You cannot scale this in any direction or it breaks the app.

Best case scenario might be that you take these apps and simply scale everything by currentDpi/96, but there's no guarantee that that's what the user actually wants. To some degree I may desire the system DPI to scale to 125% but I may value the realestate provided by the app more than having it scale to be the same. An example of this might be in visual studio where I would rather just have more room to display code than to scale the contents of the text by 125%.Reply

Tried it on my Yoga 13. Killed my Startisback, using a test version that still alpha. Really annoying as metro is just ridiculous to use for real work. IE11 seems broken, DPI scaling and text looks awful, FF and Chome are ok. Scrolling with the touchpad is choppy and terrible, touch is still good like IE10. FF and Chrome has really smooth touchpad scrolling bad choppy touch scrolling. IE10 was pretty good at both, excelling of coarse in touch, but IE11 is just broken now (both desktop and metro versions). Libraries are GONE! :O (Whether that's sarcastic or not depends if you ever used it). Now I see an annoying Bluetooth FTP in my drives menu in "This PC" (replacing My Computer). On Screen Keyboard still broken on my Yoga (more of a Yoga issue)

Still missing are touch gestures like maybe a back swipe or at least give us a few programmable ones like touchpads give us. A back swipe would be awesome. Unification of personalization functions would help also, they are pretty hard to find when control panel is missing the "PC Settings" options (only found in metro and hard to get to).

Overall i had higher hopes for 8.1, maybe final will be better. But overall i feel 8 has just too many bags of bugs over the incredibly solid 7. I'm already getting weird errors on a Haswell build for a friend, and was planning to move all my PCs to 8.1 as I had down my Sandy to upgrade to Haswell. I have 4 PCs with all 4 Gens of i7 and will have a long debate whether to put 7 or 8.1 on them.Reply

Be fair it is a beta so a certain amount of bugginess is to be expected.

I use w8 on my HTPC and sitting 8-10 ft from screen, I have warmed to the start screen. For an HTPC libraries are an excellent feature. But why MS made it so difficult to include folders stored on a NAS within a library is beyond me.

For proper work desktops I would not go anywhere near w8. I do not use touch on my work desktop - heck I can barely reach my screen without incurring back ache, to go to touch screen would mean I needed longer armsReply

I have 5 PCs with W8Pro - it does have annoying bugs, and I do not like some aspects of the app GUI, but for home use works. I upgraded from W7Pro on all of the PCs. I would recommend W8 to you, because it handles networks, accounts and file transferring better than W7. Then it depends on price - if W8 is same money as W7 licenses - get it. If W7 is cheaper, get that one. W8 is definitely not worth any price premium.If you have to pay full license price aka $100ish for W8 - better go Ubuntu, Mint or Hackintosh for anything but designated gaming PC.Reply

For anyone struggling with problem where your PC wouldn't wake up after the monitors went to standby mode using an AMD 7xxx card and Win 8, I'm super happy to report that it's completely fixed in the 8.1 preview using AMD's new 8.1 preview drivers.Reply

Does anyone know if the 3.5 gig download is just a big ISO patch or a full clean install? I'm going to install a new 256g SSD and video card on my current decktop thats win 7x64 and then make a clean install of the Win 8 that I purchased late jan but never used. Can I just use this new ISO I'm downloading now and the CD key from my 8.0 or do I have to install 8.0 and then update to 8.1?Reply